March 1 Tuesday – Sam also replied to a non-extant query from Charles F. Mosher, a journalist with the Cincinnati Post and later an auditor with the Scripps newspaper network; he was now in Covington, Kentucky.

Oh, no—I can’t have that. Obviously the story has but one purpose, one intention: to so place Brown that he can not be saved.

If there had been large chances, large probabilities, that the horse would trot away & save him, I would have unhitched the thills, or the throat-latch, or the king-bolt, or the jib-boom, or what ever its name is, so that he couldn’t. Truly Yours… [MTP]. Note: the story referenced here is in Ch. 2 of FE, p. 42-7 about one “John Brown, aged thirty-one, good, gentle, bashful, timid, lived in a quiet village in Missouri.”